UAE owner scraps hotel projects to focus on cafes

Atlas Hospitality, owner of the Radisson Blu in Dubai Media City and the Regent Emirates Pearl being built in Abu Dhabi, has put some of its UAE hotels on hold. Hotels in the design stage, including the Dubai Tower – the hotel originally due to open in Dubai Media City in 2009 –

and another hotel being considered by the group in Abu Dhabi have been cancelled due to market conditions, according to reports in Abu Dhabi newspaper

The National. Atlas Hospitality said it was instead focusing on its existing assets and expanding its newly-launched Pascal Tepper cafe brand. “These days you need to focus on your projects and make sure they are all profitable,” Siegfried Nierhaus, the managing director of Atlas Hospitality told The National. “We’ll concentrate on what we have. We were [originally] looking at much more than that. We were looking at two or three more hotels. We kept two other restaurant concepts on the side. The capital is not as available as before.” This year, the company, which is part of the Atlas Group, launched its first Pascal Tepper French Bakery cafe in Dubai Media City. The group, which also owns the Certo restaurants in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, plans to roll out the patisserie-style cafes, overseen by the French master baker Pascal Tepper, across the Middle East and Asia, with locations including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Lebanon, Thailand and South Korea under consideration. The Dubai outlet is the first Pascal Tepper store outside France.